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Barack Obama is not Jesus Christ

By John Passant - posted Thursday, 22 January 2009


Obama’s election is historic. It marks the political end of neo-liberalism as an ideology, one that has collapsed in the face of the global economic crisis and the failure of the market. It is also about generational change - a changing of the guard from the old to the new. And of course the election of the first African-American as President is earth shattering.

Obama’s presidency comes at a time of great economic crisis, what Obama himself describes as the worst since the Great Depression. His election has created a sense of euphoria among his supporters and commentators about dealing with this and other major issues. Even some Republicans have joined the partying. Obama is clearly the President of change, yet his promises have been surprisingly few and most had wriggle room attached to them.

These heightened expectations open up real possibilities for the Left because Obama will not be able to meet them. This Obama gap between reality and hope will become clearer over time.

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Obama is not Jesus Christ, although you wouldn’t know it from listening to many people and reading most commentators. Even the women in my aquarobics class in Canberra here in far away Australia were talking about getting up at 3.30am to watch the inauguration.

This euphoria is understandable. Bush leaves a legacy of world wide economic crisis (slipping perhaps from recession into depression in the next year), vast wealth discrepancies in the US, simmering racial tension, two unwinnable wars, global warming devastating the planet and Gaza in ruins thanks to Israel’s ongoing war crimes, (before we even talk about North Korea, Iran or Pakistan).

The similarities with Labour Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in Australia are stark. Rudd’s election was marked by hope for a new and better society. But our PM continues, not confronts, the legacy of Australia’s reactionary former PM, John Howard.

Obama starts about a year behind Rudd in disillusioning his supporters but will quickly catch and surpass the HowRuddista Government. I give it about six months, given the level of expectations raised, before some of his supporters and left Democrats begin to understand what they have helped create - a competent George Bush.

How so? The sense of hope about Obama is built around the idea that individuals can substantially change history. This is true to some extent, but it is the social forces they represent and can garner and put into action that make great men (and occasionally great women) great.

And there is another factor. As Marx said:

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Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.

So what forces does Obama represent? A superficial analysis would respond that he is unleashing the forces of change. Certainly he has lit the spark for change across America and the globe with his rhetoric. He has captured many in presenting an almost Harry Potter-like vision for all Americans. The difference is that Voldemort might win.

Obama’s cabinet team includes recycled Clinton appointees and Bush Republicans. Hardly a team of, or for, change. In fact it looks like a Cabinet of reaction.

Certainly his election has challenged the superficial trappings of racism. What he can’t do is undermine the systemic racism of US society. The poverty of race is not recent. It was built on hundreds of years of slavery and in more recent times racist inequality. These divisions in the working class suit the ruling class and may explain, partly, the fact that in the six or seven years of economic recovery since the last US recession in 2001 the median annual family income has stagnated or fallen slightly. In all the other booms in the past 50 years, the increase in this figure has been at least 6 per cent, and in the 60s hit nearly 40 per cent.

But I think the blame for stagnating incomes lies with George W Bush as the Commander in Chief of Capitalism. His war on workers saw attacks on wages, the minimum wage, social security benefits and public expenditure. Couple that with tax cuts for the rich and there has been a massive increase in wealth disparity in America under Bush. The rich are much richer; the poor and working class less well off.

Many workers have their main wealth in their home and superannuation. House prices have fallen 20 per cent in the last year. The collapse of the share market has destroyed much superannuation savings value. Obama has no strategy for reversing this wealth destruction.

It is not clear to me that Obama rejects the trickle down theory of wealth creation. In fact I think he believes what’s good for the boss is good for workers. Certainly he is trapped in the logic of the profit system.

Obama will in fact have a more nuanced approach to the trickle down approach. Certainly his rhetoric is about equality of opportunity (yes, I heard his inauguration speech here in Australia at 4am). Such a change would involve massive restructuring of education to ensure poor schools and neighbourhoods received a much greater part of the education budget. It would mean a huge increase in that Budget.

Perhaps Obama will increase taxes on the rich to pay for this. Certainly he has promised increased taxes for those who earn over $250,000. However Obama also sees the rich as the wealth creators.

And opportunity is not reality. How do you rise above grinding poverty and a lifetime of dealing with society’s low expectations of you to make it to Harvard?

Here in Australia for example, free university education did not change the social composition of those on campus. In the main, university has remained the preserve of the rich and the well to do middle class, or their children. Some bright working class kids do make it through. I was one of them. However the preservation of privilege in universities merely reinforces the social and income divide. Recent statistics in Australia for example show that a university education increases income by about 31 per cent.

Health reform is a major Obama promise. Make no mistake. providing for the 50 million Americans presently uninsured is a major step forward. But is that what Obama will do? He must fight powerful, entrenched interests to win this goal. Already he is talking about the reform taking some time. This could be code for backpedalling, or developing some rotten compromise that does not address the real needs of those 50 million uninsured.

How does Obama propose to address the tsunami of unemployment sweeping across America. This tidal wave is beginning to buffet Australia, with predictions unemployment here will rise from 4.5 per cent to 7 per cent by the end of the year. This may be conservative.

Unemployment is already more than 7 per cent in the US and it looks likely it will reach double figures by the end of the year. (This too may be a conservative estimate.)

Obama has developed a stimulus package worth almost $1 trillion. Even bourgeois economists like Paul Krugman argue it is not enough. Krugman estimates lost production caused by the recession is already $2.1 trillion and will worsen.

Long lasting and entrenched deficit spending will have its own economic consequences. Stagflation is one possibility.

In any event the stimulus package doesn’t address the underlying problem - the crisis of US profitability. Profit rates in the US, despite almost 40 years of declining wages, are much lower now than a decade ago and much lower than in the 60s. Falling profit rates are the dagger in the heart of capitalism. They are a systemic consequence of competition and the increasing drive for increased capital investment at the expense of similar increases in investment in labour. Since only labour creates profit this logically means that over time profit rates fall.

That’s why George Bush spent eight years waging a war on workers. I can’t see Obama taking a different road. He might initially play to his audience in part of trade unionist and other social organisations, but like President Francois Mitterand in France in the early 80, the reality of managing capitalism for the capitalists could see him quickly reverse his pro-worker positions in substance if not in form.

Again I turn to our Rudd Government. Elected on a tide of enthusiasm for change and rejection of the old conservative ways, Rudd is now urging workers to postpone wage increases and consider reduced working hours with reduced pay to “save” jobs. Disgracefully the trade union movement (including a militant union) have accepted this trickle down theory of profits first. I can see Obama adopting the same course as the economic crisis worsens and the US spirals towards depression.

On the global war front, Barack will continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here is a quote from his inauguration speech (workmanlike at best).

We will not apologise for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defence, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

Perhaps Obama might like to apply those words to Israel? No, didn't think so. Obama will be much like Bush when it comes to military adventures offshore in the name of fighting “terrorism”. Yet the new President has just become the Commander-in-Chief of Terror.

American exceptionalism - the so-called right to impose its views on the rest of the world - is not some expression of a mad president. US imperialism is the logical conclusion of US capitalism. The US dominates much of the world through its economic pre-eminence, but that may be under challenge in the medium term from China. It reinforces that dominance with military power.

As Thomas Friedman, a journalist with close connections to the US warmongers wrote:

The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without [giant arms company] McDonnell Douglas. The hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the US army, air force, navy and Marine Corps.

Obama is not challenging that logic; he is embracing it.

The defeat of the US in Iraq means that Obama’s focus has shifted to Afghanistan. This is his attempt to overcome the Iraq syndrome, and to send a message to China that the US, despite the debacle in Iraq, is still the top military power in the world and will use that power to ensure its continued economic dominance. Iraq and Afghanistan are also part of a strategy to control resources to China (Iraq) and encircle it (Afghanistan).

The United States currently has a military presence in 130 countries. Obama will not change that.

What he will do is adopt George Bush’s timetable for withdrawal from Iraq if conditions permit (forget his 16 months out of there pledge) and increase troops massively in Afghanistan. Yet Afghanistan is on the path to being lost to western imperialism. More troops won’t solve that.

Obama’s silence on the Israeli slaughter in Palestine shows to me that he will follow the usual ruling class strategy of supporting Israel as an outpost of American imperialism in the oil rich Middle East. He might pressure Israel about a two-state solution (that is, legalising the Palestinian bantustans) but the dispossession, poverty and destruction wreaked on the Palestinians will continue under Obama.

Obama has made much of a green energy revolution in the US. This is a good goal. It is unlikely the chains of capitalism will allow him to do anything substantial. Addressing climate change will challenge the powerful and entrenched polluting industries and ostensibly create job losses (or at least that is the argument the sackers from the polluting industries will assert). It could be that in the guise of environmental protection Obama imposes green tariffs on polluting nations while developing minor cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.

Again I look to Kevin Rudd as the exemplar here. During his election campaign he promised to ratify the Kyoto treaty. He has done that. Nothing has changed, other than the effects of global warming becoming more pronounced.

Rudd’s emission trading schemes is a sick joke. Its 5 per cent reduction target by 2020 is a sop to big business and ineffectual. It exempts many big polluters from paying for the schemes

All in all, like the HowRuddistas here, the new President may end up as OBushama.

The gap between expectations and reality creates an opportunity for the revolutionary left in the US and elsewhere. If at least some don’t become disillusioned with politics when the Obama gap becomes clearer to all - that change is continuity - then they may be receptive to our ideas of democracy and planning and production to satisfy human need.

Couple that with the questioning about capitalism that is going on among more and more people around the world because of the crisis, and there may be a shift among some Americans and other citizens of the world to the revolutionary Left. Our task is to patiently explain, and support those fightbacks against capitalism and imperialism that do and will occur around the world and in the US and Australia.

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This is an updated version of an article first published in En Passant on January 21, 2009.



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About the Author

John Passant is a Canberra writer (www.enpassant.com.au) and member of Socialist Alternative.

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